I saw this last month and I agree. Nina Hoss was superb as an East Berlin doctor exiled to the East German equivalent of Podunk after having asked for permission to emigrate to West Germany around 1980, close enough to the fall of the Berlin Wall and formal unification of Germany, but far enough away tat no one could have conceived of it happening in thier lifetime. Hoss conveyed the brittle interior of her character, Barbara.

Hoss is indeed wonderful, Helene, and the film is very intimate and moody. I went to see it with my French friend, and I was telling him how close do I see it related with our own situation in Cuba. Up until when me and my mom left the country, permission was still required for certain professionals by the designated minister to travel. My mother, as a University professor, had to ask the Minister of Education for a permission to be granted to visit her sister here-(she had no intentions of going back, but they did not know it, for which the process of asking for a permanent exit to US was back then a long, difficult and dangerous one, even risking one's possibility to keep working). For health professionals the process is even harder. Even now, with the new regulations abolishing the "white card"-(the official stamp in the passport to get out), health professionals are still required to get it from the Minister for temporary traveling. Permanent exit to US is still a field of its own, as it is still constitutionally considered a crime-("treason to the country" it reads). When my mother's sister and her husband left in 1965, he was taken out of his job and sent to the sugar cane fields, leaving his wife at home with two kids, no job and pregnant of a third one. They never went back.

Anyway...here's a bit of Hoss and Petzold's interview.

...and a trailer with subtitles in English. I saw it in German, but I don't know if the film has been distributed with subtitles in other parts of US. Did you get it subtitled, Helene...?